Saviors 101

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

“So, you’re not from the Christian Right here to whack me?” Jeremy poked his chopsticks into one of the white cardboard containers.

The poet guy, who looked like Kenneth Brannagh but hefting around an extra thirty pounds of Italian food at his beltline, shook his head and shoved a generous pile of steamed rice onto his plate.

“Not agents from a nasty three-letter agency come to toss me into deep dark hole?”

Virgil shook his head again and reached for the Broccoli with Beef.

“And you are really the poet of Troy, writing fifteen hundred years after its fall? And you’re really the prophet of Troy no one has believed in three thousand years?”

Virgil and Cassandra nodded in unison as Jeremy speared an eggroll.

His knee-jerk reaction was to shout that she was lying and it was only by biting his tongue that he managed to avoid the expletive.

“Ain’t it a b***h, Kid, learning to trust her?”

He nodded carefully. It would take a bit of practice.

Okay, he focused on the Kung Pao Chicken for a while ’cause he knew his mind often processed data far better when he wasn’t paying too much attention to it. All the serious programmers agreed that the hard nuts of code were cracked while you were scratching your balls or clipping your toenails or watching Bugs Bunny reruns. So he focused on each peanut, each tender morsel of chicken, each bit of green pepper dripping with thick, brown sauce.

Nope.

Didn’t do it.

There was a thirty-five hundred-year-old woman blowing gently on her Hot and Sour Soup. That was weird. Even by the standards of Chraze-manifestations-of-the-ghost-of-Czarina-Catharine-the-Great-who-died-when-the-scaffold-lowering-the-stallion-upon-her-naked-and-willing-body-broke-and-crushed-her-to-death weird. This was no lousy 9.0 on the Men in Black Weird-as-s**t-o-meter either. This was way out beyond weird and off the deep end of surreal. He knew he should be more coherent, but it just wasn’t coming.

“So Virgil and Cassandra are sitting here at my dining table on 34th street in Seattle, Washington. They’re sitting here in my dining room eating takeout Chinese food at my mom’s white plastic dining table. And they’re not here to kill me.”

The Kenneth Brannagh not-near-look-alike dipped his eggroll in the hot mustard and ate it as if it were sweet sauce. Jeremy liked hot food but he couldn’t deal with Kong Kitchen’s version of mustard more than a drop at a time.

None of the toy blocks of logic fit together. He liked eating here alone. Just him and his food and a novel set in some world that a whacked-out writer on bad-ass drugs, alcohol, and nicotine had made up for his readers. Or written because it was better than soothing himself in the dark closet, which wasn’t really all that fun after you were fourteen.

Someone had cheated and given him all square holes and a bunch of tutti-frutti colored, dodecahedral pegs.

Again he tried to wrap his mind around it in a linear, logical fashion. Or any fashion.

Nope.

Wasn’t working.

“Then what do you want me for?” He chucked down the container of pot stickers and they scattered across the table, one landing with a doleful plop of apology in Cassandra’s green tea.

Cassandra extracted the pot sticker delicately and laid it aside.

“Okay, I’ll try to explain. You won’t believe us anyway, so it might as well be me who says it. Then your brain will feel it has an excuse not to believe it and it will all seem okay.”

He’d learned that if you closed your eyes, the tiny woman who looked older than his grandma, though also younger than the girls at school, seemed almost possible. Her voice, worn smooth by the centuries, was like a lulling song that beckoned to you across the ages. She was almost believable. He wondered if he was getting a crush on her even if she was old enough, well, to be…well, you know, old.

So Jeremy stuffed a loose pot sticker into his mouth, settled in, closed his eyes and nodded. No matter what she said, he promised himself he’d believe it.

“We need you to fix the Software that Runs the Universe and save all creation.”

He opened one eye.

She wasn’t smiling.

He opened the other.

Virgil wasn’t either.

“Oh shit.”

Why did he believe her now of all times?